Picture perfect
Museum portraits offer pleasant surprises
As it turns out, size doesn’t matter. There are dozens of portraits of familiar faces in Double Take, the new exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the smallest of them may have the biggest impact.
It’s a photograph of Leonard Cohen, only a few inches wide and taken in 1972 by Arnaud Maggs, the recently deceased Toronto photographer. Given the raison d’être of the exhibition — “discovering something new and unexpected (about) 59 fascinating people who have left their mark” on Canada — the Cohen photograph succeeds brilliantly.
Maggs photographed Cohen in a men’s locker-room, and the singer/writer/national treasure looks less like the poetic “ladies man” and more like Al Pacino as a Scorsese thug. Cohen defiantly faces the camera, a white towel around his waist, his chest bare and brawny, a razor in one hand and his other fist clenched in front of him. It is wholly unlike every other photograph I’ve seen of Cohen, and so it is indeed unexpected and surprising. There are lots of little surprises, as the exhibition is set up in no particular order and therefore creates a pleasing sense of never knowing who, or what, is around the next corner. For example, the 59 people include two hockey players — the legendary goalie Jacques Plante and Cassie Campbell, a star on defence for the national women’s team — but they’re at opposite ends of the space.
There are four prime ministers — Macdonald, Trudeau, Campbell and Chrétien — spread throughout the exhibition space judiciously, as if each needed his or her own territory.
Yet there are moments of obvious conglomeration at the beginning and end: the first room you enter has a wall with fighting men (Romeo Dallaire, Louis Riel, Billy Bishop) opposite a wall of women who fought against stereotypes and discrimination (Campbell the hockey player, Adrienne Clarkson, Rosemary Brown). The last room has, hanging side by side, portraits of Wolfe and Montcalm, moved from the Plains of Abraham to the walls of Gatineau.
The attention paid to each “intriguing” figure is not determined by the scale of their contributions to Canadian life. Frederick Banting, who discovered insulin and helped to save or improve millions of lives, gets the same amount of attention as do the writer/furniture designer Douglas Coupland or the artist Mary Pratt. This is a characteristically Canadian treatment, I suppose, but by times it seems unbalanced.
Some figures do get more attention, with multiple images and artifacts that have personal connections. Beside the portrait of assassination victim Thomas D’Arcy McGee is the pistol allegedly used by Patrick Whelan in the heinous crime. A racing suit used by doomed Formula One driver Gilles Villeneuve hangs over a toy model of his car. In the next room is an enormous vase that was once given to John A. Macdonald, and reportedly used as a hiding place for his booze. It’s a really, really big vase.
Some artifacts are tremendously eloquent. Five small dresses worn by the Dionne quintuplets as toddlers are fragile, pure white relics from the part of their lives when the sisters were too young to recognize how they were being exploited as lab rats and advertising shills.
For me, the most emotionally powerful portrait in Double Take is Andrew Loomis’s 1950 painting of the quints. It shows them gathered around a campfire, cooking wieners and having a singalong, their faces happy, contented, free. How sad that the scene was a fiction. Below it hangs the reality, a large, vintage advertisement of the infant girls hawking for Quaker Oats.
There’s more eloquent sadness in the self-portrait by the late Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, and an unabashed self-awareness. Morrisseau titled it Consumed by His Own Passions, and portrayed himself as man beset by large, wicked snakes.
There are lighter moments, often in the labels over each display, which are refreshingly wink-wink for a large federal institution. Over the photograph of Jean Chrétien the label reads “Scrapper, Boy Scout reject, Prime Minister:” it seems Da Little Guy from Shawinigan was once booted from the Scouts. Perhaps that’s what later inspired Paul Martin’s palace coup.
The labels can also be blunt. Over the portrait of disgraced athlete Ben Johnson the label says, “Sprinter, Gold Medalist, Fraud.” It may reflect the view of most Canadians who remember Johnson’s ignominious 15 minutes, but it’s a notably explicit statement in an era when federal cultural institutions have a chronic aversion to potential controversy. What a surprise.
A final thought: It’s tempting to look at Double Take as an early taste of how the Museum of Civilization will be once it becomes the Museum of Canadian History, as directed by the Conservative government. That directive caused much fretfulness among those who are part of the soft, lefty underbelly of Ottawa life, as if the museum was being turned into a Gallery of Glorious Conservative Achievements.
Not to worry, if Double Take is a sign of what’s to come.
The exhibition is brimming with leading left-leaners, such as Margaret Atwood, June Callwood, Joni Mitchell, Donald Sutherland, and the environmental lightning rod David Suzuki. Maybe it’s all a harbinger, maybe it’s not. From Double Take, you take what you will.